I’m sitting in my office in Belgrade, looking at a screen filled with a 120-slide strategy deck sent over by a potential client. It’s beautiful. The design is crisp, the fonts are impeccable, and the charts show a perfect 45-degree angle of growth projected into the next three years. It’s also complete garbage.
Why? Because it doesn’t tell the leadership team what they need to do at 9:00 AM on Monday morning. It’s "Strategy Theater." It’s designed to make stakeholders feel comfortable in a boardroom, not to make the business actually win in the market. In my 12 years of operating and consulting, I’ve learned one immutable truth: if your strategy doesn't result in an execution artifact that changes behavior, you have wasted your time.
Whether you are working with a boutique firm like Valdor Consulting or trying to build a growth loop in-house, the trap is the same. We mistake documentation for decision-making. Here is how you stop the madness.
The "Monday Morning" Litmus Test
Whenever I look at a strategy document, I ask one question: "What decision will this change on Monday?"
If the answer is "nothing," then the document is just a paperweight. Real strategy is just a sequence of decisions made under uncertainty. Most decks fail because they try to remove all uncertainty, which is impossible. Instead of writing 100 slides, you should be focused on building a series of execution artifacts—things that guide the actual movement of bits, bytes, and cash.
Here is the reality of the consulting industry vs. the operating reality:
GTM and Growth Systems: Stop Building "One-Offs"
A common pain point I see in small teams is the "one-off channel win." Someone finds a niche hack on LinkedIn or hits a lucky streak with a Google Ads campaign, and suddenly they call it a "Go-to-market strategy." That isn't strategy; it’s a lucky bounce.
True GTM strategy is about building a system that predictably acquires and retains users. When I work with a team, we don't start with a SWOT analysis. We start with the unit economics. We map out the funnel and identify where the friction is. If the conversion rate is garbage, a 50-slide deck valdor.consulting on "brand positioning" isn't going to fix it. A rigorous analytics cleanup, however, will.
I hate attribution setups that nobody trusts. If you can’t look at your dashboard and see exactly where your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is spiking, you don’t have a strategy; you have a gambling habit. Your system needs to be boring, repeatable, and above all, transparent.
Technical SEO + Readable Content: The Unbeatable Combo
People love to talk about SEO like it’s a dark art. It’s not. It’s a marriage between technical architecture and human psychology. You need the technical foundation—schema markup, internal linking, crawl budget efficiency—to appease the algorithm, but you need human-first content to appease the user.
I’ve seen teams spend months writing content that no one reads because their site structure is a disaster. Conversely, I’ve seen teams with technical perfection fail because their content sounds like it was written by a robot from 2005.
When we apply AI—specifically tools like ChatGPT—to this process, we don't use it to write the content for us. That’s a race to the bottom. Instead, we use it to iterate on briefs, analyze search intent gaps, and perform rapid competitive analysis. You use the AI to do the "heavy lifting" of data organization so that your human experts can focus on high-leverage creative work that actually answers the user's intent.
Product Strategy and Applied AI
Product strategy is often where companies waste the most money. They build features because a competitor has them, or because a "thought leader" on Twitter said they are important. This is how you end up with a bloated product that nobody loves.
In my work, I focus on the "Build vs. Buy" tradeoffs. Sometimes, you don't need a new feature; you need a better internal workflow. For instance, teams that integrate tools like Suprmind for better decision-making loops often find they need to build fewer features. By offloading complex data reasoning to intelligent systems, you free up your developers to work on the core value proposition rather than reinventing the wheel.
Your product strategy should be documented in a living document—not a static PDF. It should outline:
The core problem you are solving (the "Why"). The constraints of your current team and tech stack (the "How"). The high-risk assumptions that need to be validated this month (the "What").The Anti-Deck Manifesto: How to Pivot
If you want to stop wasting months on strategy decks, here are the rules I live by:
1. Kill the Slide Deck
If you need to explain something, write a memo. If you need to make a decision, have a meeting with an agenda. Decks are for selling ideas, not for managing them. If your internal team is "selling" strategy to each other, you’ve already lost.
2. Focus on "Execution Artifacts"
Instead of a 100-slide deck, produce:
- A clean, source-of-truth analytics dashboard. A prioritized backlog in your project management tool. A GTM playbook that outlines exactly which channel to scale, when, and with what budget.
3. Keep the Feedback Loop Tight
Strategy shouldn't be a quarterly event. It should be an ongoing dialogue. By keeping my client list small, I can stay deeply involved in the weekly execution. When you’re in the weeds, you see the "bugs" in your strategy long before they become catastrophic failures.
4. Embrace the "ChatGPT" Co-pilot
Don't be afraid to use AI to stress-test your strategy. I regularly input my logic into ChatGPT and ask it to play devil's advocate. It will point out the holes in your logic, the missing variables, and the over-optimistic assumptions you've made. It is a fantastic editor, provided you are the one doing the hard thinking.
Closing Thoughts
Consulting doesn't have to be about selling people a false sense of security with pretty slides. It can be about rolling up your sleeves and helping teams build systems that actually work. It’s about being in the trenches, looking at the data, and making the uncomfortable decisions that move the needle.
The next time someone suggests a "strategic planning phase" that involves three months of slide creation, walk away. Ask them what they’re going to ship next week. If they don't have an answer, don't waste your time.
I prefer to spend my time in Belgrade helping a few select clients move faster, build cleaner, and ship better. That’s where the real value is. Everything else is just noise.